Before restoring it, i would try a third party program for transferring music over. Some programs will also allow you to sync apps aswell as create backups. This happened with my iphone a while back and i have been using third party apps since then for all of my iDevices. Also iTunes takes to long to load
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Try using CopyTrans. It is free and comes with a bunch of different tools to backup and manage your ipod.
Hope this helps.